Record Data
Source citation
Reprinted in War Department, et al., The War of the Rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies. ; Series 1 - Volume XLVII , Part 3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896), 202.
Type
Letter
Date Certainty
Exact
Transcriber
John Osborne, Dickinson College
Transcription date
Transcription
The following text is presented here in complete form, as it originally appeared in print. Spelling and typographical errors have been preserved as in the original.
Savannah, April 5, 1865.
Major-General Gillmore, Hilton Head :
General: I received yesterday, through Colonel Woodford, an invitation to state what I think ought to be done to repair the injury done to the Catholic cemetery of this city. Here is my answer : The works ought to be stopped at once; the ground leveled as it was before; the walks marked out ; the tombstones, railings, and ornaments of the graves restored as they were before; the fence around the cemetery put up again; the mortuary chapel, which was in progress of erection, built up again, and the expenses of disinterring and interring the dead again defrayed to our Catholics. I decline accepting in exchange for the cemetery any piece of ground which would belong to parties in the Confederacy. Colonel Woodford informed me that you are a Catholic. The certainty I thus acquired of a fact which I only suspected before, increased my grief that the Catholic cemetery should have been desecrated and destroyed by your orders, and it imposes on me the obligation to mark you of the censures of the Church against those who usurp her property and infringe her rights. I trust, therefore, that you will do everything in your power to give God and his church the satisfaction required in this instance, and that you will remember the maxim, "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul? "
AUGUSTIN VEROT,
Bishop of Savannah.
